To start with the streets around us are silent and empty, but soon we begin to encounter other people – and after that, it isn’t long before the sporadic clusters become a throng. Men push handcarts laden with goods, or squat in the street playing dice; women carry trays of fruit and hot meat on sticks; boys tussle in the dirt, getting under everyone’s feet. The air is dense with the hawkers’ cries and the rattle of wheels, with the mingled smells of burnt fat and unwashed bodies and manure, with smoke and rainwater.
As Fabithe and I weave our way through the crowd, I decide that he was exaggerating just a little about my northern appearance. Although a good number of the people here look like Oriana and her father and the other Citadel folk – warm brown skin, hair in various shades of autumn – it’s by no means all. If anything, the real difference is my clothes. The people around me are uniformly dressed in muted ochres and greys, the women wearing skirts or knee-length tunics over soft leggings. In this context, my sweatshirt and jeans are so bizarre that I doubt anyone has even looked at my face.
“So, the way to the Citadel,” I gasp, trying to keep up with Fabithe’s long paces. “Will you give me a map, or …?”
“Something like that.”
I never realised quite how aggravating Fabithe was from inside his own head. Stands to reason, I suppose. “Then where are we going?”
“My room in the Golden Hand.”
Right. I wrote this down. His room is paid till the end of the week. Which means … “This is Easterwood?”
He gives me a sceptical glance. “Do you often show up in the middle of a city without knowing its name?”
All the time. Though not usually in my own body. I have the inappropriate urge to giggle – and the more I try to suppress it, the worse it gets. Fabithe rolls his eyes and keeps walking, which only makes me laugh more.
Once I get a grip on myself, I start after him again, but now we’ve been separated by a fight breaking out between two tradesmen. The people nearby gather to watch, a few coins passing from hand to hand as bets are taken. Edging around them, I nearly walk into a woman holding a tray, who offers me a charcoal-toothed grin. “Lucky charm, dearie?”
I peer into the tray. It appears to contain body parts: bits of scalp with the hair still on them, teeth, finger-bones, toes, and what looks like someone’s ear. Ugh. I hate some of the things my imagination conjures up.
“Fresh last week, these are.” The woman pushes them closer to my face. “You know what they say – carry a bit of a hanged man and you’ll never swing yourself!”
Shaking my head, I hurry past her. I can’t see Fabithe anywhere. I’ve lost him. I –
Wait.
I might not be able to see him, but he’s there, somehow. At the back of my mind. It’s as though someone has tied a silver thread between us, and if I concentrate, I can get a dim sense of what he’s doing. More than that – if I wanted to, I could slip down the thread and straight into his head.
If I wanted to …
This girl makes no sense.
Fabithe keeps one eye on the crowd, looking out for unfriendly faces. Even now, young Forrest is probably convincing his father to avenge a grave insult to the family name. And Alani will be out for blood, too. Not to mention old Seregrass. In fact, the only point in Fabithe’s favour is that he’s made so many enemies, they’ll have to compete with each other to take him down. It’s a very small point, but a point nonetheless. Yet next to Alyssia, the horde of people queuing up to kill him pales into insignificance. Because she knows Ifor. Whatever she may pretend, she knows him. And that means she’s either the greatest asset to have come Fabithe’s way in five years, or the greatest threat.
Because she makes no sense, it’s almost impossible to tell which.
He’s never met anyone who’s so difficult to place. She looks like a northerner, yet he can’t identify her accent. Her glossy hair and the lack of calluses on her hands put her at the upper end of the social spectrum, yet she showed up alone in a run-down area of the city, and her clothes are indescribable. She tried to conceal the fact that she recognised him, yet she says things that seem designed to throw suspicion on her. She claims to need his help because she doesn’t know the way to the Citadel – or that she’s in Easterwood, or that Easterwood is in Castellany – all of which adds up to what has to be the worst cover story in history. Yet he’s almost certain she’s unarmed.
More than anything, what he reads from her is confusion. And that confuses him, too.
I’m Alyssia Gale. I drag in a breath. Then another. I’m myself again, back where I belong. I –
Scents and sounds jumble on top of me. Laughter. Wet horses. A woman swearing. The stench of burning meat, the slow drip of rain from the roofs. The hubbub of conversation.
Easterwood.
I’m still here.
This is all in your head, a little voice whispers. You’re trapped inside your own mind. Somewhere in the real world, you’re sedated in a hospital bed.
And yet …
I stumble over to lean against the nearest wall, covering my face with my hands. This isn’t like seeing through Ifor’s eyes. I could almost accept coming back from that to find myself still here, because none of it had ever happened before. But Fabithe? I’ve been inside his head countless times, and this time was no different from the rest. Maybe I’ve achieved such an epic level of mental confusion that I’m imagining myself in the same fantasy world as the people I’ve seen all these years, yet still seeing them in exactly the same way. Or maybe …
This is real, the same little voice says. This is all real. You were seeing the truth the whole time, and now you’re stuck in it.
It’s hard to allow even the possibility of that. However real what I see has seemed in the past, I’ve never seriously entertained the thought that it could be true. That kind of thing simply doesn’t happen, even to girls who always harboured a secret hope of finding adventure at the back of their wardrobe. And besides, I didn’t want to believe it. Because that would have been too cruel: watching Oriana’s tragedy unfold, and having no way to stop it …
But now I do.
Now I do.
Maybe all this is real, or maybe I really have lost my mind. It doesn’t matter. Whether I’m going to blink and find myself back in Woodleigh, missing only a few seconds instead of the hours and hours I thought had passed, or whether I’m stuck here for good … either way, this is my chance to help Oriana, and I have to take it. Imaginary or not, she’s my friend.
“Alyssia.” Fabithe’s voice makes me jump. Slowly, I lower my hands to meet his gaze. How long has he been there?
“Fabithe. I – I lost you.”
“I noticed.”
“Sorry. I felt a bit dizzy.” I look up at him, searching for any hint of sympathy or understanding, but find none. His expression is as mocking as ever. And judging by the fading memory of what I just saw, he’s going to want answers. Maybe accompanying him isn’t really that sensible after all. If I die here –
Yet I know Fabithe. He’s as sharp as a knife with two blades, but I don’t think he’ll hurt me.
“Ready now,” I say. “Shall we go?”
We walk on together; after a while, Fabithe looks down at me with a faintly appraising air. “So why was Alani chasing you?”
“He came looking for an illegal card game.” I can’t help the note of accusation that creeps into my voice, but Fabithe doesn’t betray by so much as the flicker of an eyelid that he knows what I’m talking about. “And all he found was me. That annoyed him.”
“He’s always annoyed. Doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to arrest you, even for him.”
“It probably didn’t help that I slapped him.”
The hint of a smile touches Fabithe’s lips. “Probably not.”
“And then he saw the scar on my palm …”
“Scar?”
I hold my left hand up for his inspection. I can’t tell whether he notes the coincidence; he doesn’t mention it, saying only, “Some of the guards are superstitious bullies. Not the best combination in a city where most people have scars.” He rubs the fingers of his own left hand absently against his palm. “Although you don’t have an identification mark …”
“Identification mark?” I echo. He shakes his head.
“Don’t worry. I don’t have one either. It seems neither of us is meant to be here.”
Yeah. I’m not going to argue with that.
“I don’t get it, though,” I say. “Why the scar – I mean, Alani said something about blood magic, and he wanted to have me tested …”
Fabithe’s lip curls. “They do this all the time. Drag people down to the lockup, shove a piece of neolyte into their hands, then act surprised when their birthstones don’t disappear.”
“What? Why?”
“Because supposedly neolyte stops people doing magic, so it should vanish away the illusion making them appear whole.”
“What?”
He shoots me an irritable glance. “I know. Bunch of nonsense. But keeping people terrified of something absurd, like magic, distracts them from other things. Like the price of grain or the latest rise in mercators’ fees.”
I want to say What? a third time, but it doesn’t seem to be working as a way of getting information I can actually understand.
“So,” I say instead, carefully, “people who can do magic don’t have birthstones?”
“According to the stories, no. Because they cut them out. On purpose.”
“And that …”
“Lets them use the power in blood. Other people’s or, failing that, their own.” This time, his glance is calculating. “You’ve not heard any of this before?”
The truth is, I haven’t. I’ve heard blood magic referred to, but I never really understood what it meant. It’s a subject people talk about only in whispers. As for birthstones themselves … well, I know everyone in this world is born with one, as the name suggests. That it’s meant to confer character, ability and ultimate destiny. And that it’s considered to be as fundamental a body part as your heart or brain. So to cut it out …
Luthan. The name drops into my head with a little jolt. Because this is what she was planning, last time I saw her. To take up a knife and cut out her birthstone.
Toralé. His name follows swiftly, with another jolt. Because I never doubted that all four of the people I saw in my visions inhabited the same imaginary world. So if this is real …
If this is real, Luthan and Toralé are out there somewhere, too.
“Is it actually possible?” I ask Fabithe. “To cut out your birthstone and become a mage?”
He snorts. “Blood’s just blood. There’s nothing magical about it. All that happens if you cut out your birthstone is you die. Or else you lose all sense of what’s real, but that’s only a slower route to the same destination.”
The part of my stomach that isn’t already tense with fear for Oriana lurches for Luthan. Yet her father did it, didn’t he? And Isidor is still alive, and seems rational enough. So maybe …
She’ll be fine, I tell myself. One thing at a time.
“Here we are.” Fabithe’s voice cuts through my tumbling thoughts, and I look up to see a narrow, dirty building. The Golden Hand. Like many of its neighbours, it has no windows, and the uneven stone fronting is smeared with old blood and grime. I hesitate, examining the sign that marks the place: what appears to be a severed human hand, shrivelled and most certainly not golden, swaying with the force of the rain. From within the building comes the deep bass sound of male voices, raised in raucous laughter and violent disagreement alike.
I nearly turn and walk away; but Fabithe has already entered through the low doorway, and I can’t afford to lose him. Taking a deep breath, I step over the man who lies groaning on the threshold and push open the battered, crooked-hinged door.
Immediately the smell of damp clothing and cheap spirits hits me. It’s like walking into a greenhouse: the same humidity, the same pungent, earthy reek. The city street, as filthy and vermin-ridden as it was, seems a haven of fresh air in comparison. I close the door behind me before looking around the room. It contains a few tables and chairs in varying degrees of dilapidation, but no sign of anything I would call a bar. Assorted pairs of ill-favoured eyes return my gaze, along with one single glaring eye belonging to a man whose left socket is a scarred crater. None of them look friendly, and I can’t see Fabithe anywhere. A tense, unforgiving silence fills the space.
Finally, a man emerges from what is presumably a back room, wiping a stone cup with a piece of rag. He looks me up and down, then folds his arms. “Well?”
I can’t stop my voice shaking. “I’m … I’m here with Fabithe.”
The name evokes a noticeable lightening of the mood. The men relax, begin talking amongst themselves again; the landlord gives me a nod. He clearly isn’t a man who smiles much, but there is a certain easing of the muscles in his face as he looks at me.
“Upstairs,” he says. “I’ll show you. Want a drink?”
My throat aches with thirst. Encouraged by the general response to Fabithe’s name, I take a few steps further into the room. “Yes, please.”
“Katikay? Ikor? Klaf? Sweetwater?” He rattles off the names as if I should know what he’s talking about. They’re almost familiar, like something out of a half-remembered dream – well, yes. That’s more or less what they are.
“Sweetwater?” I suggest, it being the only one that sounds like a real word. He disappears into the back room and returns with two cups, which he holds out to me.
“One sweetwater. And the usual for Fabithe.”
I peek into the cups. One liquid is the colour of honey; the other is deep crimson and gives off fumes that make my eyes sting. Holding the drinks at arm’s length, I follow the landlord across the main room and through another door. Beyond lies a dingy hallway and a flight of rickety stairs, up which he gestures.
“All the way to the top. It’s the only room up there.”
After climbing four flights, I knock on the single door in front of me with my elbow. To my relief, Fabithe opens it. He’s in his shirtsleeves; I can see the shabby coat on the back of a chair behind him.
“I thought you weren’t coming.” He takes the cup containing the red liquid and disposes of its contents in a single swallow, before stepping aside to let me in. “Have a seat.”
I edge past him and sit down where he indicated, on a wooden chest at the foot of the bed. Ducking my head, I take a cautious sip of sweetwater, which turns out to be surprisingly delicious: like honey and oranges. When I look back at Fabithe, he’s sitting astride the chair that houses his coat, watching me.
“Well?” I prompt him. “How far is it to the Citadel? Can I get there before tomorrow evening?”
“Probably.” Once again there’s an uncomfortable intensity to his gaze, as though he’s assessing me against criteria I can’t begin to understand. “But you’d have to leave now. It’s already past noon, and you can’t ride through the night.”
“Ride?” I echo. “You mean … on a horse?”
His eyebrows lift, and I realise how inane that must have sounded. Of course on a horse. What else? But I keep my expression steady, waiting.
“Here’s the deal,” he says finally. “If you answer some questions for me, I’ll take you to the Citadel myself. But if not, you’re on your own.”
“You promised me directions!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you – ” Wait. No, he’s right. He very carefully didn’t promise me directions.
I glare at him; he returns the gaze calmly. And I thought I was good at making myself unreadable. I look away, around the room, but find little in the way of distraction: it might be neater and cleaner than the rest of the building would have suggested, but it’s just as bare. A narrow bed, a table with a handful of wood chippings wedged beneath one leg and a single candle on top, Fabithe’s chair and the chest beneath me make up the entire list of contents.
“Why do you live in a place like this?” I ask him. A self-mocking smile touches the corners of his mouth.
“It suits me.” He folds his arms along the chair back; the smile fades. “But once again, you’ve avoided giving me an answer.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Where you came from. Why you’re so anxious to reach the Stone Citadel. How you knew me, and knew where to find me. The exact nature of your relationship with Ifor Darklight. And why nothing about you quite … fits.”
“So, basically my entire life story.”
His expression doesn’t change. “That would do, for a start.”
We don’t have time for this conversation. Yet without it, he won’t show me where to go … I bite the inside of my cheek. “Do you trust me?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“But if I promise to give you answers on the way to the Citadel …” I fold my own arms, trying to look stern. “Surely that’s good enough? Only you said yourself it’s already past noon.”
He studies my face a moment longer, then laughs. It isn’t a happy laugh. It conveys an emotion somewhere between Why is this happening to me? and To hell with it.
“Why not? I need to get out of this city. And it beats waiting another five years.”
I don’t know what that means, but the fact that he’s willing to take me to Oriana is all that matters. At his gesture, I scramble down from the chest at the foot of the bed, then watch in fascination as he flings open the lid and begins to empty it. I don’t even recognise half the stuff he’s taking out. Clothes, yes. Rope, bandages, blanket roll. A cooking pot and some kind of lantern. But then there’s a little round metal box, and a wrapped packet, and a sort of funnel thing that maybe has something to do with collecting rainwater … I feel hopelessly underprepared.
Then he removes a thin piece of wood about the same size as the chest – a false bottom? – and lifts out something that is indisputably a sword.
I’m familiar with weaponry, mainly through Fabithe himself. I’ve even felt the weight of this very sword on my back; he doesn’t seem to use it, ever, just carries it around from town to town and keeps it hidden while he goes about his business. I don’t know why. And in my own life, I’ve seen a couple of kids pull knives on each other. So I have no real explanation for why my heart starts racing and my muscles tense, ready to run. Maybe it’s the unsettling awareness that he could kill me in an instant, and there’d be nothing I could do to defend myself.
I could try to cross over into his head again. The connection between us is still there, the silver thread of understanding. I could find out what he thinks of me, whether he means me any harm … but no. I don’t think I can handle looking at myself through someone else’s eyes. I’m only just coping with this situation as it is; surely that would tip me over the edge.
“All right.” Fabithe stands up, swinging the sword into place. “First, we need horses.”
“You don’t already have them?” Not that I’ve ever seen him around a horse before. I just assumed, by the way he talked, that getting hold of one would be easy. Judging by his expression, that was a foolish assumption.
“Does it look like I can afford to keep horses? No, some of Ifor’s men are stationed here in Easterwood. They’ll not mind us borrowing two of their mounts in order to attend their lord’s wedding.”
“Really? But I thought – ” Pitifully late, I catch the sarcasm. “Oh. You mean steal them. Is that safe?”
“I’m more worried about how we’re going to get into the Citadel,” Fabithe says. “The outer gate shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve got a long cloak that’ll cover your clothes – with any luck they’ll think you a northern noblewoman arriving for the celebration, and me your bodyguard.” He indicates the sword on his back. “But getting into the Citadel itself … the guards at the inner gate will be stricter than those at the boundary wall. They’ll not let anyone in without identification.”
I have a solution for that, though I’m not sure he’ll like it. If I can find the door – and I think I can – it will be our way in. I just have to hit Fabithe with the right amount of challenge … I look up at him, eyebrows raised. “There’s always the door of the dead.”
“We can’t go that way.” His reply is instant. “It’s bad luck.”
“I wouldn’t expect a man like you to believe in luck.”
“I don’t. Not exactly. But everyone knows it’s not a good idea to …” He discards the half-finished sentence with an irritable shrug. “Besides, it will be hidden. And locked.”
“Are you telling me you can’t pick a lock?”
“No, but – ”
“I know where it is, Fabithe.” I know because Oriana knows. Because she used to have nightmares about it, when she was younger, and so it’s one of a handful of things I saw often enough to remember. Every few weeks, a cart leaves the Stone Citadel for the burial pit beyond, carrying the bodies of any dead who are not eligible to lie in the great stately tombs beneath the Citadel and must be interred in the bare earth outside. Rather than pass through the main gates with all the other traffic, the dead cart travels along hidden paths to reach its destination; and it begins by being loaded through a recessed door set in the inner wall that separates the building and its immediate environs from the wider Citadel lands.
Leaning forward, I press the point home. “Once we’re on the right side of it, there are plenty of ways into the building. The inner wall is the main defence.”
“You know all that,” he says. “And yet you don’t know how to get there.”
“Answers on the way, remember?” Buoyed by the unearned confidence of having him on my side, I flash him a smile. “Let’s go.”